On Friday and Saturday, Beer Advocate hosted its 11th annual Extreme Beer Fest at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston.

It was the largest of the Extreme Beer Fests, with more than 70 brewers and 2,500 beer fans attending in each of the three sessions.

The Extreme Beer Fest has always been my favorite festival - I've attended 10 of them - and always have a lot of fun drinking creative beers. But, several brewers attending the festival said the Extreme Beer Fest has changed the definition of what once was extreme beer to what it is today.

"When we first started going to festivals, other brewers would make fun of us for bringing beers with ingredients like chicory in them," said Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Ales in Delaware.

When the Extreme Beer Fest first started, extreme usually meant high-alcohol beers, and they were often not very good, said Tomme Arthur of the Lost Abbey in California.

"I definitely had issues with a lot of the beers being not good," Arthur said.

"There were a lot of beers that were esoteric for esoteric sake," said Arthur. "You don't see that as much. Chefs continue to push boundaries, and brewers are doing a good thing."

This year, there were plenty of high-alcohol beers, and beers with what would be considered unusual ingredients such as passion fruit, cucumber and hot peppers. But nowadays, the beers are brewed with ingredients meant to add flavor to the beer, not just for the sake of adding to it, Arthur said.

Jack Hendler, co-owner of Jack's Abby Brewing in Framingham, said the word "extreme" is disappearing from the beer lexicon since pretty much everything is acceptable when it comes to brewing beer today.

"Extreme is trying to push the boundaries," said Hendler. "Any style that people don't readily have available to them is extreme. Experimental beers. But those things are almost mainstream now. In 10 years, will there be a need for an Extreme Beer Fest? I don't know."

Dean Rohan, co-founder of Tree House Brewing Company of Monson, Mass., attended his first Extreme Beer Fest over the weekend, but said he has seen the difference as a beer drinker over the years.

"Extreme has gone through a couple of different places," said Rohan. "It doesn't mean it has to be high ABV (alcohol by volume) and it doesn't mean it has to be have high IBUs (International bittering units). It means the beer has to be something different.

Calagione's brewery, Dogfish Head, is known for making some of the more boundary-pushing beers on the market today, and he said he is happy to see other breweries now pushing the same boundaries.

Page 2 of 2 - "For us, it's refreshing and rewarding to see this community blossom," he said. "We've done a great job, as a community, to make sure that extreme does not have to be synonymous with high alcohol. We love how far it has come."

Email Norman Miller at nmiller@wickedlocal.com or call 508-626-3823. Check out the Beer Nut blog at blogs.wickedlocal.com/beernut. Follow him on Twitter at @realbeernut. Also check out "Norman Miller, The Beer Nut" on Facebook.